Is this the end of The Global War on Terror? asks Jim Fallows on theatlantic.com. “For years anti-terrorism experts have stressed the decentralized, self-sustaining nature of al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations around the world. The elimination of the celebrated symbol and inspiration of the movement will certainly not mean the end of terrorist threats, …
Navy Seals killed the terrorist Osama bin Laden in a compund in Abbottablad yesterday. “Justice has been done,” said President Obama, and though long delayed, it has been. Good riddance. Writing in the Times today, Ross Douthat says “This is a triumph for the United States of America, for our soldiers and intelligence operatives, and …
Usually when I see a play and think that the acting is a little hammy and the script a bit sappy, I have not had a good time. In the case of War Horse, however, which Ginny and Molly and Cara and I saw last Sunday, those objections were overshadowed by the sheer awesome, brilliant …
A self-proclaimed actor and writer named Will Hines has written about Spy on a website called splitsider.com. “Maybe you’ve heard of Spy Magazine, the satirical magazine that was one of the funniest things ever in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but never read it. Now that Google Books has put much of the Spy …
David Brooks of The New York Times and Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated are both good writers and astute commentators who almost never work the same topic. And they might not think that they were doing so earlier this week. But I do, and it’s my blog. First, let’s hear from Brooks. “You could easily …
Richard Cohen had a useful article in The Washington Post the other day, in which he takes on the myth around Robert E. Lee. “It’s about time Robert E. Lee lost the Civil War,” writes Cohen. “The South, of course, was defeated on the battlefield in 1865, yet the Lee legend — swaddled in myth, …
Paul Krugman had another very fine column on the budget deficit in the Times yesterday. “The core of the Ryan proposal is a plan to privatize and defund Medicare. Yet this would do nothing to reduce the deficit over the next 10 years, which is why all the near-term deficit reduction comes from brutal reductions …
Joe Nocera made a good point about education in the Times yesterday. “[S]ocial scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is …
I didn’t want to write about Donald Trump anymore, but he is making me do it. Today, President Obama published on the White House website a long-form version of his birth certificate. This “certificate” is a longer, more complete document than the “certification” that his campaign released in 2008, which is what a citizen of …
It will always be an impediment to any mellowing of my feelings towards Ronald Reagan to recall his visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi after becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1980. Philadelphia was the place where the Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and for Reagan, in his …